If you are avoiding spoilers for a 1939 novel, do not read this. I am using the new BBC adaptation as our jumping-off point, but there are no major differences in plot (only in sexiness and cocaine usage.)
Beulah Maud Devaney's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
In your previous life you were a medical practitioner and accidentally killed a patient while drunk. Since then you have stopped drinking, changed your name to something with the same initials as your previous name, and moved within 5 miles of the original murder. You have also married the dead patient's spouse.
N.B. I am perfectly aware that "Modern Love" articles are carefully calibrated to create outrage in people such as myself. Personally, I think I do an admirable job ignoring them, as a general rule. I am, however, MERELY A HUMAN WOMAN, and you can only ask so much restraint of me. When I checked the home answering machine after my ferry commute across San Francisco Bay, there was a proposal of marriage from my…
Previously: Men about to get murdered in Patek Philippe ads. If you have ever leafed through an issue of The Economist or any other glossy magazine meant for the upwardly mobile as they wait in first-class airport lounges, you have seen a Patek Philippe ad: a blond father and son, usually on a boat, are laughing sternly at the sea, while the tagline reminds you that "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You…
Lawrence Evalyn's last piece for The Toast was 100 Actual Titles of Real Eighteenth-Century Novels.
As a graduate student of specializing in eighteenth century British literature, I get to read some pretty amazing stuff. The following is a curated selection of actual entries in the index of Ann B. Tracy’s important reference text, The Gothic Novel, 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Before the Victorians turned the Gothic into moor-stranded governesses
1. It has to be a stranger. It has to be. This is no time for settling old scores. This cannot be traced back to you in any way. You can't see them during your daily routine; you can't have mutual friends; you can't live in the same county. You cannot research them online before you do it. Do you know how many killers get convicted who might have otherwise walked free because their goddamn browser…
This post was brought to you by Siri Raasch, who once worked for an unusual older woman in Maine.
I have been prepping to be an old lady my entire life. When I was in third grade I had a subscription to Reader’s Digest. I ate Raisin Bran for breakfast. And every Sunday night at eight, after 60 Minutes, I plunked myself in front of the television and waited,
There are twelve-hundred-and-fifty-seven ways to kill a woman. There are only twelve-hundred-and-one ways to kill a man. I made the lists separately and then typed them up and merged the Word documents in the Computer Lab, so those numbers are verifiable. I also sorted the tactics into categories—sneaky, particularly gruesome, ritualistic, biblical, and so on—and then I made a very large Venn diagram one night when everyone else was at Rodeo Round-up, and I looked…
If you have ever leafed through an issue of The Economist or any other glossy magazine meant for the upwardly mobile as they wait in first-class airport lounges, you have seen a Patek Philippe ad: a blond father and son, usually on a boat, are laughing sternly at the sea, while the tagline reminds you that You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. And yet the father never…
All I really want to talk about today is this New York Times multimedia account of what I feel pretty comfortable referring to as a colossal miscarriage of justice stemming from (best case scenario) incompetence and closed ranks. No, that's silly. LOTS of women who are packing their bags to leave their boyfriends change their minds and instead shoot themselves twice with their boyfriend's service revolver with their non-dominant hand. CHRIST ON A FUCKING…
Previously: Virginia Woolf, Beloved Chinese Novelist. "I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It…
Devoted readers know I have long been obsessed with the ease with which one can kill or maim oneself in the kitchen. Just the other day, a Toast commenter had to curtail their weightlifting after nearly losing a finger to their immersion blender. My father needed stitches after slicing a bagel. And, of course, avocados: